seems a general problem with a lot of people, thought maybe we can just stick that there. any additions, suggestions for other utilities, anti-virus and spyware programs and such are appreciated, also would like to hear comments.


Getting your computer to run faster

A lot of people seem to have problems with computers slowing down on them. To solve this you don’t need much knowledge or ability just be able to follow these simple few steps which would solve 90% of PC sudden slowdown cases.

1. Scans

First of all, you should get rid of all the malicious programs that might be sucking your PC’s power. So you should run a basic set of Virus and Spyware scans. If you already have an anti-spyware and anti-virus programs installed, just make sure they are up to date and run them. If you don’t have any installed than you must have a lot of spywares that slow you down, I suggest you immediately get some protection and run a scan.

There are many free scanners such as AVG, you just need to download one and run the scans.

2. Cleaning dirt

Once you deleted all the viruses and spyware that lurked in your machine, you’re ready for the next step: removing useless stuff you put there.

First up is the all mighty “Disk Cleanup” utility. You can find it in the Start Menu > Accessories > System tools > Disk Cleanup. This utility has a list of places in which your programs and applications save their temporary files, such as Internet Temp Files and the recycle bin. Once you open the utility (it should take a couple of minutes to calculate the entire temp files) you should check all the boxes except for “compress old files” – this would take a lot of time.

Next cleanup is at the same window of the cleanup you’ll find the “More Options” tab; in there will be links to the rest of the important places you could clean from:

“System Restore” – In that window you should delete all the previous system restore points, these could take some space.

“Installed Programs” – This will load the list of all the programs you have installed on your computer. Check each and every entry in that list and delete things you don’t use anymore. Make sure you only delete items you know what they are! Don’t delete any programs you’re not sure what’s their use and you think you don’t use them – they could be Drivers or Operation System updates!

3. Disk Defragmentation

First I’ll explain what Disk Fragments are and why do they slow you’re PC down. All the information on your computer, Operation system, files, programs EVERYTHING, is written on the Hard Disk Drive (Don’t confuse this to the Random Access Memory – aka RAM). The Hard Drive has so much information stored on it that in order for the Operation system to know where is each file it has what’s called an Allocation table. This table has the list of each file on the system and where on the Hard Drive are his parts.

When you want to open a file or run a program the Processor goes to the Allocation Table and asks for the locations of the files, if the files are scattered all around the Hard Disk it takes more time for the Processor to read everything thus making the whole experience slower. I won’t get into why are the files in so many parts and scattered on the hard drive, you’ll have to take my word for it.

Those scattered parts of files are called ‘Fragments’; What Defragmentaion does, it reads the Allocation table and rearranges all the files so that their pieces are close together on the disk and thus are faster to read. Since it takes a lot of moving around (sometimes you’ll move the whole capacity of your disk twice or more in one Defragmentation) it takes time. Thus you should run the defragmentation tool (which can be found in the same menu as the Disk Cleanup: Start Menu > Accessories > System tools > Disk Defragmentaion.) at night. It could take a few hours.

4. Final Check up

After you’ve completed all of the above, restart you’re computer and run the PC Pit stop online checkup utility, here’s how to do it:

1. Go to http://pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp and click the key in ignition button under the header “New member”. I suggest you do this with Internet Explorer since this checkup is better suited for it.

2. Next a security certificate notification will pop up click yes and Install the utility (a popup window as well).

3. In the next window click on the gray “Don’t create a free account” button.

4. Read the instruction on the next page and click let’s go. The text should now run and show a lot of
different windows. Make sure you don’t work on the PC at the same time and you don’t have any programs on.

5. After all the tests are done an info gathering window will come up. Don’t fill the top form, only the one below “Computer Information”. If you don’t know you’re internet connection information then you should disregard the analysis of the Internet in the report. (Note: if the problem you’ve encountered has slowness in loading internet pages you should find out your internet information from your ISP and insert it to get a proper reading). Click Go.

6. This last screen is the report: in the Customized Tune-up Tips you should attended any red problems immediately and then continue to the yellow alerts and so on. Click on each link and a page with an explanation how to solve that problem will appear.

After this check up you should have an optimized computer, at the cost of nothing!

Hardware info:

In case you’re computer is still slow you should check your hardware. You can load up your system information by right-clicking you’re “My Computer” icon on your desktop and selecting properties (or Windows-Key+Pause/Break shortcut). In that window you should check the ‘Computer’ section. It should come at the following format:

• CPU Name
• CPU Speed, amount of RAM
• Physical Address type

You should be interested in the CPU Speed and RAM. Most computers should have around 1GB of ram (1024 MBs) for good performance on office work, and it doesn’t cost much to upgrade. You can check www.crucial.com for info on how to upgrade your RAM.

If you’re CPU is below 1GHz it might be just a bit too slow and you should consider a new computer if slowness really bothers you. Keeping a Computer with less than 1GHz of CPU speed is possible, but takes a lot of effort in cleaning it regularly.

General warning when trying to ‘fix’ your computer

Don’t do anything you’re not sure of, don’t delete files you’re not sure what they do, unless you know what you’re doing avoid going to places like the ‘Registry Edit’ (aka: regedit) or the Windows Directory. You could just as well be harming your machine.

Most importantly: Always, always, always keep a backup of your important files! A PC could die and loss of data is significant for some people.

Contact and additional help

I hope this guide helps, if you have any additional problems you can contact me by Email @ Barak.shelef@gmail.com or add me in MSN Messenger at the same address. You can also PM me via the forum message system. Good luck.

Wow, that's a really nice guide!
I'm really liking it

I wouldn't mind if you split it up into some paragraphs and use more blank lines to make it look better, cause atm it just looks like a big mess

But it's great for sure, if you clean it up a bit I'll sticky it.

will do,

Well done, actually simplified enough that most people can read it. The website you referred for testing is pretty well done - although it only flagged a "Minor" problem when I ran it on my server with no AV software installed.

It looks pretty well formatted too me~
-Stickied.

Nice guide i will have to do all this.

thanks guys...

yah, PC Pitstop is a great site. me and my father keep our 400 Mhz Machine (that has 192 MB RAM ) a live with it.

Decent guide I must say, I like it.

I also recommend removing unneccisary programs that aren't used as often. I lot of computers that come built from a company such as Dell like to add on software that just take up memory and can be removed. My operating system doesn't even have the classic games like freecell or minesweeper.

yah, another option along with system restore and installed programs in the system cleanup is removing windows components that most people don't need such as the basic games, fax programs, hyper terminals and such, what dell and other PC manufacturers install is counted in the Installed programs list. Removing the maybe 2-3 windows services won't do much difference, and you never know when you're gonna be so bored minesweeper will sound good.

how do you run deep scans on symantec anti virus?

when opening the panel (double click on the tray icon) in the side list chose "scans" and then select "scan computer" and check your hard drives. generally that's it but it varies between different versions.

Nice guide.

Full scan will check all file on your drive and may take a long time. It can be useful though, I've found that quick scan doesn't always catch all problems.

I suggest to do a quick scan every week since it only takes half an hour or so and can run as background. but a thorough scan is essential from time to time.

Great guide. Never knew about the PC Pit Stop, but this stuff works great. I've used CCleaner and Disk Cleanup before, and have been able to remove over 10 Gig's of junk at once before.

Here is a lengthy one i wrote once long time ago.
This has been tested ONLY ON WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL.

http://www.helium.com/items/260980-windows...-desktop-screen

OR

True, I usually only run a full scan if I'm confident my computer is infected or I know I will be away from my computer for a while. Otherwise I do them once a month. I do quick scans at least once a week.

@DragonSkin:


First, it is much easier for a normal user to disable those services via the services tab in Msconfig - No one should fool around with the options in services.msc - especially since that guide does not outline how to actually use it to disable them.

A few things about those services:

Automatic Updates: Why would you disable automatic updates? Of all companies, Microsoft would not waste money on updates if they weren't important.

Computer Browser: I would not disable Computer Browser if the computer uses any network shared resources. (IE: Shared printer, Shared folders on a server) Or needs to keep track of network resources.

Indexing: If you -ever- have to search your entire computer for one file - then the indexing service is well worth having on, it hardly impacts performance on a modern computer.

Net Logon: If you belong to a domain (IE: If your computer requires logon to a server) then do not disable this service. It will cripple your ability to logon to that domain.

While I do not recommend someone who doesn't know what they are doing to disable any microsoft services, i'll list a few that can be safely disabled in most situations:

1: NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
2: Help And Support
3: Remote Access connection manager (Unless you use RDP)
4: Remote Access auto connection manager (Again, unless you use RDP)
5: Remote Desktop Help Session Manager (Again, Unless you use RDP)
6: Task Scheduler (Unless you use scheduled tasks)
7: Terminal Services: (Unless you use RDP)
8: Windows Messenger. (This should ALWAYS be disabled, and most likely already is. Having it enabled constitutes a security vulnerability)

Note that these are generally the -ONLY- services that can safely be disabled on any computer without causing commonly used applications to work incorrectly.

RDP: Remote desktop Protocol. Assuming you do not use Remote Desktop to log onto your computer remotely, you do not use RDP.

I usually disable Automatic Updates since I hate its automatic restarting. I either change it to off, and manually update OR leave it download but don't install.

Agreed with the rest of your statements tho. I still feel Indexing is a waste of memory capacity and it affects it a LOT!.

People without much knowledge of computers shouldn't remove the windows update since if they disable it once they'll forget to turn it on and fail to receive important updates.

+the Netmeeting remote desktop sharing is very useful for people who can't do stuff on their own much. I helped a few friends with and it was quite useful. I still suggest you keep it.

People without much knowledge of computers shouldn't remove the windows update since if they disable it once they'll forget to turn it on and fail to receive important updates.

+the Netmeeting remote desktop sharing is very useful for people who can't do stuff on their own much. I helped a few friends with and it was quite useful. I still suggest you keep it.

Couple of points:

Automatic Updates: The quote is a good point but if you dont want to keep them on, you need to keep watching google till the next service pack is out. That will contain all the latest updates and hopefully your decent firewall should proptect your pc.

System restore: This is the most likely place any form of maliscous data tries to hide its little self. There are a couple of things you can do to prevent this.

1) External Backup: Basically if your have access to external storage like i do (External HDD) then after you regular scan has found nothing then back up your entire C: directory to the external storeage and never leave it plugged in with internet access. You leave it as a stand alone pretty much guarentees no virus's etc.

2) Clean out your system restore: Theres no point in having hundreds of restore points - I advise customers on 5 points. 1 point of when you first recieved your computer, 3 of there own choice and 1 of after there scans.

Computer Security: simple rules to follow with this, dont go cheap. Yes there are many free alternatives to the paid security suites but at the moment ive found Kaspersky internet security to be the best one out there.

ByteUK This is where i get my internet security etc from. Cant argue with £15 a year for complete internet security.